Plenary 1: Hard Questions about Youth Justice? Radical Surgery Required or Just Some “Nip and Tuck”?
Judge Andrew Becroft, Principal Youth Court Judge, New Zealand
Youth Justice is a headline grabber. More than other areas of the justice system, it is often a “political football”. And it is all too susceptible to volatile pendulum swings in policy and approach, easily dominated by populist pressures. Youth Justice requires a principled, evidence-based, best practice approach. International experience, research and practice have clearly established what are the key features of effective Youth Justice systems.
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Plenary 2: Community-Based Options in Handling Children at Risk and in Conflict with the Law
Ms Alicia Bala, Undersecretary, Department of Social Welfare and Development, and Chairperson, Juvenile Justice and Welfare Council, Philippines
Rehabilitating Children in Conflict with the Law requires multi-pronged interventions targeting interrelated social illnesses that result in breakdown of values due to lack of education and parental guidance as well as peer influences. The Philippines responded by passing and implementing the Juvenile Justice and Welfare Act. The Comprehensive Juvenile Justice Intervention Program was formulated with three major interventions to guide various stakeholders: Primary, Secondary and Tertiary interventions. Each of these intervention levels will be discussed during this session.
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Plenary 3: Forensic Psychiatry in the Singapore Context
Dr Stephen Phang, Forensic Psychiatrist, Institute of Mental Health, Singapore
This session will focus on the practice of forensic psychiatry in Singapore, including the more unique features of forensic practice in the local context. Also briefly presented is the branch of public law known as the criminal or penal law, which forms the backdrop to the forensic psychiatric discipline.
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Plenary 4: Preventing Juvenile Crime Through Community Partnerships: The Pathways to Prevention Project as a Case Study of Developmental Prevention in Disadvantaged Communities
Professor Ross Homel, Director, Key Centre for Ethics, Law, Justice and Governance, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia
This session will use the Pathways to Prevention project in Brisbane as an example of a researcher-practitioner partnership that aimed to apply knowledge about human development to the design of programs that affect preschool and primary school children living in socially and economically disadvantaged communities.
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Plenary 5: Pathways to Delinquency: Implications to Offending Prevention and Treatment
Associate Professor Dennis Sing-Wing Wong, Associate Professor, Department of Applied Social Studies, City
University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Criminologists have endeavored to incorporate the most promising insights from various psychological and sociological perspectives into a single integrated model to explain delinquency since the late 1970s. Based on the findings of Western researchers and the author’s own social work experience, an interactional social process model is constructed to explain the onset and continuation of delinquency. This session will highlight the model and its implications to youth offending prevention and treatment as well as how the theory of reintegrative shaming and restorative justice are useful for delinquency prevention.
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Plenary 6: Rehabilitating and Reintegrating Youth Offenders: Are Residential and Community Aftercare
Colliding Worlds for Staff and Kids?
Associate Professor David Altschuler, Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins University, Institute for Policy Studies, Maryland, United States of America
This session will identify how and why the worlds of residential and community aftercare can diverge, exploring the implications these have on both the young people themselves and public safety. Evidence-based strategies and promising practices that directly address the divergences will be described and discussed. Organisational structure, policy guidance, management, staffing, workload, training, program components and philosophy, assessment and classification, graduated incentives and consequences, collaboration, and quality assurance will each be examined as they relate to bridging residential and community aftercare.
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